"Do not waste life clinging to ecclesiastical
dogmas which represent no eternal verities,
but search elsewhere for truth which may haply be
found."

Walter Richard Cassels was born in London on 4
September 1826. His father Robert was a British consular official,
and Walter spent much of his early life in India. Eventually he
went into partnership with two of his brothers in a business firm
in Bombay. He served in the legislative council of Bombay from 1863
to 1865. After 1865 Cassels returned to England.

In 1874 an anonymous work appeared entitled
Supernatural Religion: An Inquiry into the Reality of Divine
Revelation. The work attracted immediate attention, and there
was much speculation as to the identity of the learned author;
however, no one would admit to the authorship. Many books and
articles were soon written responding to the criticism of
Christianity made in Supernatural Religion. The most famous
of these is a series of essays by Bishop J.B.
Lightfoot. The Bishop's essays were later collected and
published as a book. Meanwhile, the author of Supernatural
Religion was finding his book had gone into a sixth printing by
1875. In 1877 a third volume was added, and a completely revised
edition appeared in 1879. A series of anonymous replies to Bishop
Lightfoot and other critics appeared -- one as a series of magazine
articles, the others as notes or prefaces to subsequent printings
of Supernatural Religion. These refutations were also
collected and published as a book.

Word of Cassels' authorship of Supernatural
Religion began to leak out in 1895, when he published a series
of signed articles on theology. However, Cassels never made public
acknowledgement of the fact that he wrote Supernatural
Religion. In fact, very little is actually known about Cassels'
private life, or of how he became such an expert in the early
history of Christianity. It is known that he collected art, wrote poetry, and was a Fellow of
the Royal Photographic Society. He never married and
died in London on 10 June 1907.

"Supernatural
Religion... excited much interest by the outspoken criticism
pervading it. The learned work furnishes efficient aid to rational
inquiry, and deserves to be studied by all lovers of free
investigation. The assaults which were made upon minor details
leave its main positions unharmed."

"The answer which
Lightfoot, the late Bishop of Durham, offered in the name of
orthodoxy... is extraordinarily weak... the short-sighted scholar
[Lightfoot] found nothing better to do than to submit [Cassels']
examination of references in the Fathers to the Gospels to petty
criticism; while, even if all the Bishop's deductions were correct,
the general result of [Cassels'] inquiries would not be in any way
altered. It is not surprising that in his reply to Bishop
Lightfoot... [Cassels] not only adheres to his historical positions
as not upset, but that he also repeats his general conclusions in a
form of more pronounced antagonism."